Goals

Specialization by example seeks to make it specialization easier for designers and processors.

DITA specialization by example should meet the following requirements:

Reduce design effort

Handle the housekeeping tasks for specialization such as generating the class and domains attributes, supporting both XSD and DTD representations, emitting group, element, and type definitions in the XSD design pattern, emitting the entity and element definitions in the DTD design pattern, and so on.

Minimize design errors

Define specialized designs on base designs so incompatibilities don't occur.

Leverage inheritance

Specify base inclusions as part of specialized designs so specializations pick up changes to the base.

Reduce expertise

Remove the need to understand the design pattern for DTD and XSD. Allow people who are close to the problem but lack technical expertise in DTD and XSD to contribute to the solution by annotating mockups of specialized designs.

Increase processability

By creating a validated semantic representation of the DITA model, enable efficient and reliable processing.

A secondary goal is to avoid the need for significant new infrastructure, relying on:

• DITA specialization for defining vocabularies for representing design.
• Existing DTD and XSD parsers to validate instances.
• Existing XML editors for creating new designs.
• Existing build choreographers such as Ant to process dependencies.
• Existing XSLT processors to processes representations.